A decade after being forced through two years of Latin by my high school in De Pere, I covered the great outdoors for the Wichita Eagle, and fell in love with the Kansas state motto:

Ad Astra per Aspera

To the stars through difficulties.

Our news business has struggled with its share of difficulties in the 21st century, as new technologies transform how people buy products and find news. Hard to imagine that the iPhone has existed only 10 years and Craigslist was a tiny San Francisco startup in the early 2000s.

Recent signs have emerged that legacy news providers are finding a next generation of subscribers by delivering quality reporting to mobile platforms and social feeds. The New York Times, for example, has enjoyed two straight quarters of revenue and profit growth fueled by digital subscriptions. Similarly, digital-only subscriptions to the Journal Sentinel have soared more than 60% this year.

I believe this shows we still offer a vital service to our community and democracy, providing news and information folks want to manage their lives and be good citizens.

As the transformation of the news business has forced us to make disciplined choices, we've chosen to emphasize breaking news and expert in-depth reporting important to Wisconsin and not available from other sources.